Some Of The Possible Changes Coming For The Desktop With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release.

With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Focal Fossa, we've known about some items like working to drop Python 2 and never-ending GNOME performance work and continuing the great ZFS/Zsys integration introduced as experimental in Ubuntu 19.10. But there's also more coming to this next Ubuntu release due out in April.

Among the items being discussed on the Ubuntu Desktop Trello board include:

- Continuing to improve the GNOME desktop performance on Ubuntu.

- Improving fingerprint driver/support on Ubuntu at the request of an unnamed OEM.

- Potentially integrating USBGuard for providing better USB security against rogue devices via whitelisting/blacklisting.

- Adding Feral's GameMode to the Ubuntu archive for helping those gamers wanting to optimize their system performance for gaming.

- Improving Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer for those wanting to do desktop installs to RAID arrays.

- Updates around the Ubuntu live-patching support/experience.

- Continued work on ZFS/Zsys support.

- Potentially re-enabling NVENC support in Ubuntu's FFmpeg binaries, which is for providing modern NVIDIA GPU based video encoding. It had been disabled since Ubuntu 18.10 over license compatibility concerns.

- It still appears to be an open item whether Ubuntu will enable flicker-free boots similar to what Fedora and other Linux distributions have begun shipping in recent months for enhancing the UEFI boot experience.

The current activity can be seen via this Trello board.